GEOGRAPHY, FILM, AND VISUAL CULTURE
A one-day symposium hosted by the King's Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Doctoral Training Centre (KISS-DTC)
Supported by the Department of Film Studies, King's College London
0930-1650, Wednesday, 30th April 2014
Nash Lecture Theatre, K2.31, King’s Building
Strand Campus, King’s College London
In the past twenty years, there has been a surge in scholarly interest in the relationship between geography, film, and visual culture as part of
a broader reconfiguration of the relationship between the humanities and social sciences. This has entailed an increasing tendency among
historians and theorists of film and other visual media to think geographically, use geographical methods, and draw on the work of particular
geographers; and it has entailed an increasing interest among geographers in the forms and practices of visual media as objects of study, and
in issues of representation. Studies of the city, landscape, place, and globalization have been especially enriched by this trend.
This one-day symposium is intended to provide an opportunity to reflect on these developments and speculate on their future, to hear a range
of papers from various disciplinary backgrounds, and to discuss some key questions around which they revolve: What is the value of thinking
about film and visual culture geographically? What insights and methods can those based in the arts and humanities gain from geography?
What can geographers learn from a consideration of film and visual culture that they cannot learn from other sources? What insights from the
arts and humanities can geographers put into action in their own work?
Attendance at the symposium is free of charge, though prior registration is strongly advised as places are limited. No prior study of the
geography/film/visual culture intersection is required – the event is designed to be of interest to specialists and non-specialists alike.
All are welcome.
0930-1000
Dr Mark Shiel (Film Studies and KISS-DTC, KCL), Welcome and Opening remarks
1000-1100
Keynote 1, Professor Stanley Corkin (Comparative Literature, Cincinnati), “The Spaces of cinema and the places of
films: Hollywood and (mostly) urban geography”
1100-1120
Tea and coffee (provided)
1120-1250
Dr Martha Shearer (Film Studies, KCL), “Place, genre and studio production: New York and the Hollywood
musical”
Viktoria Vona, (Geography, KCL), “Artivist documentaries: Resisting gentrification in New York and London”
Searle Kochberg (Creative Technologies, Portsmouth), “Finding place in [sub]urban space: Gay Jewish Male life
stories filmed on the streets of London”
1250-1350
Lunch (buffet provided)
1350-1450
Keynote 2, Professor Matthew Gandy (Geography, UCL), “Cinematic Landscapes”
1450-1510
Tea and coffee (provided)
1510-1610
Dr Johan Andersson (Geography, KCL), “Dispossession and the picturesque: the ruinous cinematic landscape of
New York City 1980-1985”
Dr Jinhee Choi (Film Studies, KCL), “Korean gangsters in urban spaces: Seoul, Busan or somewhere near”
1610-1650
Roundtable discussion
To register, or for any enquiries, please contact:
Dr Mark Shiel, Department of Film Studies, King's College London, The Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom
[email protected]
Department of Film Studies, King's College London
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/filmstudies/index.aspx
King's Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Doctoral Training Centre (KISS-DTC)
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/study/pg/school/dtc/welcome.aspx
BIOGRAPHIES
Johan Andersson is Lecturer in Urban and Cultural Geography at King’s College London. He has a BA in literature and art history from
Stockholm University and a PhD from the Bartlett, UCL Faculty of the Built Environment, on contemporary queer nightlife in London. He is the
co-author of Planning on the Edge: The Context for Planning at the Rural-Urban Fringe (Routledge, 2006) and has published essays in
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Antipode, and Urban Studies.
Recently, he has turned to cinema in an attempt to merge Marxist methodological approaches from urban geography with work on
spectatorship in Film Studies. The first output from this research is an article on Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown in Environment and Planning
D: Society and Space (vol. 31, 2013).
Jinhee Choi is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London. With a BA and MA in Aesthetics from Seoul National University she also
has two PhDs — one in Philosophy and the other in Film Studies — from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her books include the
monograph The South Korean Film Renaissance: Local Hitmakers, Global Provocateurs (Wesleyan UP, 2010) and two co-edited volumes, Horror
to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema, with Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano (Hong Kong UP, 2009) and Cine-Ethics: Ethical Dimensions
in Film Theory, Practice and Spectatorship, with Matthias Frey (Routledge, 2013). Recently, she has also published the book chapters “Exiled in
Macau: Hong Kong Neo-Noir and Paradoxical Lyricism”, in E. Yau & T. Williams (eds.), Hong Kong Neo-Noir (Hong Kong UP, 2013) and
“Multinational Casts and Epistemic Risk: The Case of Pan-Asian Cinema”, in M. Hjort (ed.), Film and Risk (Wayne State UP, 2012).
Stanley Corkin is a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati and one of the most
important historians of film and media whose work examines the interaction of cinema, media and cities. He is the author of Starring New
York: Filming the Grime and the Glamour of the Long 1970s (Oxford UP, 2011), Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and U.S. History
(Temple UP, 2004) and Realism and the Birth of the Modern United States: Cinema, Literature, and Culture (Georgia UP, 1996). His fourth
monograph The Wire: Space, Race, and the Wonders of Post-Industrial Baltimore is forthcoming from University of Texas Press in 2014.
Matthew Gandy is a Professor in the Department of Geography at University College London. He is the author of Concrete and Clay: Reworking
Nature in New York City (MIT Press, 2002) and the editor of The Return of the White Plague: Global Poverty and the 'New' Tuberculosis (with
Alimuddin Zumla; Verso, 2003), Hydropolis: Wasser und die Stadt der Modene (with Susanne Frank; Frankfurt: Campus, 2006), Urban
Constellations (Berlin: Jovis, 2011), and The Acoustic City (with B. J. Nilsen, Berlin: Jovis, 2014). He has contributed essays on film to Screening
the City (Shiel and Fitzmaurice, eds, Verso, 2003), Landscape and Film (Lefebvre, Routledge, 2006), Geography and the Humanities (Richardson
et al, eds, Routledge, 2010), and The Blackwell Companion to Werner Herzog (Praeger, ed., Blackwell, 2012). His next monograph, The Fabric of
Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination, is forthcoming with MIT Press.
Searle Kochberg is a maker of and writer on cinema and other performing arts. He is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Portsmouth
in Auto-ethnographic Film and Jewish London. He teaches film studies, directing and script (fiction and nonfiction) at the same institution. His
short films have included Leaving the Table (2007) and L'Esprit de l'Escalier (2010) both of which enjoyed exposure at several international film
festivals. He has edited the textbook Introduction to Documentary Production (2002) and contributed to Introduction to Film Studies (2012)
and Promotion in the Age of Convergence (2012). His only play, Isle of Joy was presented as a workshop performance at the Tristan Bates
Theatre, London, 2007.
Martha Shearer completed her PhD in Film Studies at King’s College London in 2013. Her doctoral research concerned the relationship
between New York City's postwar transformation and its representation in the Hollywood musical. She teaches film and media studies at King’s
and the LSE and has also taught at Kingston University and Royal Holloway, University of London.
Mark Shiel is Reader in Film Studies and Urbanism in the Department of Film Studies at King's College London. He is the author of two
monographs - Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles (Reaktion Books, 2012) and Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City
(Wallflower Press/Columbia University Press, 2006) - and the editor of Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context
(Blackwell, 2001) and Screening the City (Verso, 2003), both with Tony Fitzmaurice. He is currently editing and contributing to a collection of
new essays entitled Architectures of Revolt: The Cinematic City circa 1968 (Temple UP, forthcoming 2015). At King’s, he is also the convener of
Theme 8 of the King’s Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Doctoral Training Centre (KISS-DTC) which deals with “Urbanization, Globalization, and
Social Change”.
Viktoria Vona is currently pursuing a PhD in Geography at King’s College London where she is also a member of the Cities Group. Having spent
the first decade of her life in communist Hungary, she experienced rapid social change first hand, developing interests in democracy and social
and economic equality which she pursued in art by completing a BA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art. The topic of her PhD is
'The Role of Artists in Resisting Gentrification in London and New York City'.